Saturday, February 6, 2016

What Do We Mean, “Normal”?

A few weeks ago a volunteer from the United States was telling me how much Tegucigalpa had
challenged her expectations.

“I expected there to be poverty and all the bad things you
hear about,” she said, “But there's malls here and TGI Friday’s – it’s actually pretty normal!”

“Normal”, of course, was a short-hand for “familiar." But I
knew, and sympathized with what she was trying to say. Realizing that Hondurans
eat at TGI Friday’s, that they take their kids to karate class, watch Netflix,
and snap Instagram shots of their latte art, makes Honduras feel a lot less
foreign.

A few weekends ago, I went to a friend’s house and we cooked
pasta with pesto and an apple pie. I went and saw a Hollywood movie (in
English, with Spanish subtitles) in this mall, then I went out with friends to
a tea shop and sipped lemongrass tea while we talked about books we’d recently
read.

To me this felt normal,
by which I mean familiar. Not all my weekends are like this, but the
familiarity was comfortable and rejuvenating. And I realized this – I can
create a life for myself here in Honduras that feels familiar. But there was
nothing about that weekend that was normal.

I live in one of the poorest countries in Latin America,
where half of all residents are still rural farmers, and where the GDP per capita
is about $6/day. Over 60% of Hondurans live in poverty, and 60% of these
poorest Hondurans will have dropped out of school by age 12.

This isn’t just Honduras. Something like 80% of the world
lives on less than $10/day. Poverty is normal.
The threat of diseases like malaria, dengue, HIV-AIDS is still normal. Gender inequality, racial discrimination,
violent armed conflict – these things are still all too normal.

TGI Fridays is not normal.

It’s only natural to feel more comfortable in places that look
familiar, or to connect more with people who share your background, your
interests, and your outlook on life. But to see these things as the norm is dangerous.
When we have the idea that “normal” means “like us”, that means that those who
are different are somehow “abnormal”, and, thus, that they should change.

This is sneaky rhetoric. It happens in the United States
when the goal for immigrants or ethnic minorities is “assimilation,” which
often secretly means, “act, talk, and think ‘normal’,” which often means, “act,
talk, and think like the white, male people in power.”

Acting “normal” becomes the test for which the reward is
professional advancement, integration into social groups, and the constant
murmur of, “why can’t the rest of them
be like you.”

But a world in which all think, speak, and act alike is no
world I want to live in.

It’s easy to come to Honduras and connect with people who
are like me, friends who grew up on the same U.S. media, graduated college, and
enjoy travel and hiking and coffee shops. It’s harder to connect with the girl
in my neighborhood who dropped out of school at 15 to have her first child, who
makes what living she can selling gum and newspapers by the bus station, and
who’s too tired to have many hobbies.

It’s harder, but there’s more to learn in that friendship
than in people who reinforce what I already think and know. We have a problem
in our world where powerful people know and interact only with other powerful
people, and view those with less education, fewer connections, less experience
as less interesting, less worthy of
attention, less normal.

Until we know and care for people who aren’t like us, we can’t
be their advocates and they can’t be ours. We can’t start the work of
reconciliation across culture or class or position. We’ll keep thinking “their”
underprivileged position is because they aren’t enough like “us.”

It’s not that I shouldn’t enjoy lemongrass tea with friends
when I am in a position to do so. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with
karate or Netflix or Instagram. But it’s important to recognize how rare and
unusual these privileges are where I am – and how rich lives can be even when
they don’t contain them.

This is a challenge to myself to redefine normal and stretch
my boundaries of the familiar, to appreciate the wealth of differences this world
hosts, and accept humbly that I’m not normal, not remotely, and that that’s
okay.